Are religions that important?

Tue, Feb 21, 2010

Editor: Many of the conflicts that are raging throughout this world are as a result of differences in religious beliefs. This has been going on for thousands of years and there seems to be no end in sight. There is fighting between persons of different religions, as well different denominations of the same religion.{{more}}

The thing that most religious persons fail to remember is that all religions are simply beliefs. Hardly anything can be proven. When I ask Christians whether or not a God exists and prove it to me, they often ask me who made me and the world. Though we believe that it is someone or something called God, we simply cannot prove it.

As far as I am concerned, all religions are right and all are wrong. Each is right to the believers and wrong to the non-believers. However, persons take them so seriously that they are prepared to die or kill for their religion. Many have stopped being rational human beings or have even taken leave of their sanity.

Many of the religious beliefs we hold so dearly are actually laws laid down by leaders in the past, who claimed that they were sent by God to lead the nations. That is why so many of the laws of countries nowadays are based on religious beliefs and not common sense. They often claimed that they were inspired by God. Of course, we all know that many of the things written in the main books for the religions are simply not true, but we are afraid to question them. I can quote from the Holy Bible in Deuteronomy 25:11, “If two men are having a fight and the wife of one tries to help her husband by grabbing the other man’s genitals, show her no mercy, cut off her hands.” Was this inspiration from God?

Our religious orientation is primarily determined by where we were born. That is to say that if we were born in the west, we most likely would be a Christian and a Muslim, if we were born in the Middle East. It is unfortunate that slavery caused us to abandon our African religion. However, many of our black brothers and sisters are very grateful that they were taught Christianity, because they now believe it to be the only true religion. We have accepted Christianity as if it is our religion. This is one of the reasons that we seem to have no identity as a people. We have been taught that God loves the poor and took it to heart, so while those who enslaved us were trying to accumulate wealth, we were there singing praises to God. Where has that left us today? We are poor mentally and physically.

Religions no longer act as stabilizers for societies. Christians often say if everyone turn their life to Christ things would be much better. This may be true, but it is also true that if everyone should show a little more care and be more rational things would be better. We do not need religions to tell us to be good.

Mystic